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May be ARM made fatal error in China
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Arm Ltd., the chip designer owned by SoftBank Group Corp., accused the ousted head of its China joint venture of hurting its business there, escalating a dispute that’s becoming a test of Beijing’s willingness to protect foreign investment in the world’s second-largest economy.

    The U.K. chip giant in June announced it was firing Allen Wu, the head of its Chinese unit, over undisclosed breaches of conduct, but the executive has refused to step down and remains in control of the strategically important operation. Rather than the peaceful, rapid resolution that both sides have said they want, the situation has deteriorated.

    Wu has hired his own security and won’t let representatives of Arm Ltd. or his board on the premises, said a person familiar with the situation. He’s refused to hold a planned event to connect Chinese chipmakers with Arm Ltd. and avoided negotiations despite public statements to the contrary, said the person, who asked not to be named.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-29/arm-accuses-china-venture-ex-ceo-of-blocking-its-business

    It is one small thing, China forced to sell 52% of ARM China shares to local investors in 2018.

    It seems like UK and Softbank wanted to reverse this installing their own managers using small part of chinese shares.

    We can see see next steps as in few days ARM China can be even officially declared as 100% Chinese property.

  • 7 Replies sorted by
  • zcreamzcream

    This is usually called theft.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @zcream

    It is usually called free and efficient business practices :-) Widely used by Google and alike to get something they want.

    Can check old attempt to snap Olympus :-)

    Or even newer attempt with kidnapping of Ranault CEO because Us and Japan was not happy with too big sales of their electric cars.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    200 employees of ARM China sided with Allen Wu.

    Softbank, ARM UK and Hopu Investment tried to make small coup and fire present director.

    It seems like Hopu Investment who is originally "Chinese" but fully controlled and consist of ex Goldman Sachs people.

    it is very important how all this will end, as ARM UK hope that this coup will allow them to block licensing of ARM to many Chinese firms and hence hurt them badly.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    Allen Wu and Chinese authorities still fully control Chinese branch of ARM

    Note that due to specific agreement ARM China has fully independent right to provide licenses to all ARM architectures.

    This is why we see such fight over it, and this is why Nvidia slowed down in buying ARM, as original idea had been to instantly cut all Chinese companies from ARM using direct Nvidia order (not Trump order).

    But with China still controlling this branch whole plan went down the tubes.

  • endotoxicendotoxic

    I think this will end up in ARM accepting Chinese branch giving it independence over ARM without giving it the name. Apple will procede with its plans and buy Nvidia who I will buy ARM, for not paying that much taxes.

    China will never loose that branch, that I’m surely positive.

    Thing is ARM will be produced by both sides later, and will be fighting between the best processes and designs.

    Like x86 history with AMD. There are always mistakes

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    ARM totally lost

    Arm China held an event at which they formally declared their independence. They proclaimed that 安谋科技 is China’s largest CPU IP supplier. It was born from Arm, but is an independently operate, Chinese owned company.

    The event comprised of cheering on 安谋科技 business. Some of the fanfare was emphasizing that 安谋科技 had a cumulative 20B shipments since formation. It has over 90 partners, 29 of which have achieved mass production of chips using the Arm IP. These shipments range from mobile, network infrastructure, 5G and IoT. They were developed by the company’s 400+ person R&D team that is based entirely in China.

    https://semianalysis.substack.com/p/the-semiconductor-heist-of-the-century

  • endotoxicendotoxic

    Lol.

    Was a very unlikely situation that China at this point would Let that fat piglet called ARM go. It’s so juicy and tasty thing. Chinese love pigs! Those dirty little honk honk things they shurely powerfull under new labels of the SoC being made.

    Lovely.

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